MARCH 1 – At dawn on Sunday, February 29, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was forced from office under intense pressure from Washington, bundled
aboard a U.S. plane and removed from Haiti, not knowing where he was being
taken. A few hours earlier, U.S. government spokesmen declared that “Aristide
must go,” regardless of his constitutional authority. Shortly after his departure,
the first U.S. Marines arrived, seconded by soldiers brought in from France’s
Caribbean colonies. Also on Sunday, the United Nations Security Council met
in emergency session to give its backing to the colonial occupation. The
tactical differences between the imperialist rivals over the Iraq invasion
seem to have been overcome, and the Haitian masses will pay the price. In
the name of “democracy” and “peacekeeping,” the imperialist powers are reinstalling
a government of the death squads who previously slaughtered thousands. Every
Haitian knows how the U.S. Marines arrived to impose “order” in 1915,
and kept the country under military rule for 19 years. The dramatic developments
of the last two days make the call in the leaflet issued Saturday by the
Internationalist Group (printed below) for the formation of worker and peasant
self-defense groups to block the death squad army and throw the imperialists
out of Haiti all the more urgent.

Combat the
Coup Plotters – No Political Support to Aristide!Organize Worker-Led Resistance
Against Death Squad Invaders!

FEBRUARY 28 – Over the last three
weeks, murderous right-wing rebels have launched an armed coup d’état
against the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. There should be
no mistaking who these sinister “insurgents” are: their leaders are the former
heads of death squads, police and army units who slaughtered thousands when
they were last in power. The coup plotters are allied with a so-called “democratic”
opposition coalition, which has been covertly financed by the Bush regime
via the International Republican Institute. As the rebel military force seizes
town after town with a relatively small contingent, there has been little
resistance and in some cases support from the impoverished population, ground
down by years of penury. This is the result of anti-worker economic austerity
and privatization policies carried out by Aristide on orders from the International
Monetary Fund. Yet as military forces draw near to the capital of Port-au-Prince,
residents of the sprawling slums and pro-Aristide “popular organizations”
have thrown up barricades as a measure of self-defense. They know well that
a victory by the rebels would lead to a bloodbath among the poor and working
people.

While the United States has pretended to be neutral in this showdown, and
Aristide himself was installed by U.S. warships ordered in by Democratic president
Bill Clinton, this takeover attempt has clearly been cooked up in Washington.
Recently there have been calls, particularly from liberal Democrats, for
new U.S. intervention in Haiti to back up the elected Aristide government.
But as the Pentagon moves to send in an expeditionary force, it is clear
that its aim would be to remove the Haitian president. Moreover, the French
government has set aside its tactical differences with the U.S. over the
invasion of Iraq and joined its imperialist rivals in seeking to push out
Aristide. Along with the Canadian second-rate imperialists, Haiti’s former
colonial masters propose to organize a “multinational peacekeeping force”
in tandem with U.S. Marines which would impose a new occupation of Haiti,
perhaps under the cover of the United Nations. Working people, minorities,
students and all opponents of imperialism – particularly in the United States,
France and Canada – should mobilize to oppose this imperialist intervention,
whatever its purported aims, including workers action where possible to block
supplies to the invaders. Drive the imperialists out of Iraq, Afghanistan
and Haiti!

At the same time, Haitian working people should give no political support
to the Aristide regime. The former Catholic parish priest and proponent
of Liberation Theology has long been an instrument of imperialist domination.
After being elected with an overwhelming majority in 1990 elections, he was
forced out by some of the same forces who are now mounting a comeback. He
spent several years in exile in Washington, where he became the darling of
black Democratic Congressmen and was braintrusted by the Clinton administration.
He was reinstalled by the U.S. in 1994, flying back together with Secretary
of State Warren Christopher while Navy cruisers made a show of muscle in the
Port-au-Prince harbor. Once in office, he followed the dictates of Washington
and Wall Street and privatized a series of industries, leading to layoffs
of several thousand workers. Due to IMF-dictated austerity policies, mass
misery deepened with unemployment estimated at upwards of 70 percent. Now
Aristide is harvesting the bitter fruits of being an imperialist minion, to
be discarded when no longer useful, as with the former CIA man Manuel Noriega
in Panama in 1990.

The imperialist press, dutifully following the scripts handed them by the
White House in Washington and the Elysée Palace in Paris, almost unanimously
portrays the Aristide regime as a dictatorship of criminal thugs (while remaining
tight-lipped about the murderous thugs now mounting a coup in the name of
“democracy”). In reality, the rapid advance of the rebels is due to
the fact that Aristide dissolved the army and has no more than 5,000 lightly
armed police (who have been most of the 80 killed so far in the rightist revolt).
But the virtual destruction of the Haitian economy has meant that, aside
from drug trafficking, the only source of wealth is the government itself
with its meager tax receipts and dwindling international aid. The result
has been a sordid battle for control of the machinery of government by rival
bands, the pro-Aristide militias dubbed chimères and the remnants
of the tontons macoutes of the former dictatorship of François
(“Papa Doc”) and Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier which ruled the country
from 1950 to 1986 with Washington’s blessings (and money). In recent months,
the situation in Haiti increasingly resembled Jamaica in the 1970s, when
Michael Manley’s PNP (Progressive National Party) faced off with Edward Seaga’s
JLP (Jamaica Labour Party), often leading to shootouts between housing projects
controlled by rival political gangs. In the extreme, this situation could
lead to a total breakdown of the state as occurred in Somalia in the early
1990s.

Many of the complaints about brutal repression by the populist Aristide
government come from the popular-front opposition which groups social-democratic
leftists such as Gérard Pierre-Charles (former head of the Haitian
Communist Party, now leader of the Democratic Convergence) and trade unionists
together with bosses such as Andy Apaid (the U.S.-born sweatshop boss who
heads the “Group of 184”). This unholy alliance mirrors the pro-imperialist
opposition to the populist government of Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chávez,
and indeed they have used many of the same tactics (including a failed “general
strike,” in reality a lockout, called by the Chamber of Commerce with the
cooperation of pro-capitalist union misleaders). While masquerading as “civil
society,” the political opposition is in fact a vehicle for the bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois elite, most of them mulatto, congregated in the hilly
suburb of Pétionville, who see themselves as taking back power from
Aristide’s base of impoverished black slumdwellers of Cité Soleil.
The rival demonstrations give the appearance of a clash between the “haves”
and the “have nots.”

Meanwhile, the rebel military leaders are certified mass murderers. Top
leaders include Jean Tatoune of the death squad euphemistically known as
the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH); Louis Jodel
Chamblain, who led paramilitary death squads that killed hundreds during
the Raul Cedras regime of 1991-94; and Guy Philippe, the former police chief
of Cap-Haitien and son of a coffee plantation owner, who “trained at a military
academy in Ecuador after Mr Aristide disbanded the army, where he received
instruction from French troops and the US secret service” (London Guardian,
27 February).

In the U.S., various fake leftists give political support to Aristide and
his Lavalas (avalanche, in Creole) political party as the victims of imperialist
intrigue. Indeed, many of these groups, such as the Workers World Party and
Socialist Workers Party, have been allied with Aristide’s man in New York,
Ben Dupuy, the former editor of Haïti-Progrès who
is now head of the pro-Aristide PPN (National People’s Party). But Aristide
is no anti-imperialist. Rather, he was the Democrats’ man in Port-au-Prince,
who has been strongly supported by black Democratic Congressmen such as Charles
Rangel in New York, Maxine Waters in Los Angeles and Barbara Lee in Oakland.
Now the Republicans want to bring back their men, so suddenly the former Haitian
army and police forces reappear from their exile over the border in the Dominican
Republic. The working people and poor, in Haiti and elsewhere, should
not politically support either side in the competition between a threadbare
imperialist-installed populist regime and a squalid imperialist-backed unpopular-front
opposition. Aristide’s chimères, recruited from the lumpenproletariat
of the unemployed, would attack proletarian revolutionaries as quickly as
they beat up students and “civil society” marchers.

But faced with the threat of the return of the death squads and the military/police
mass murderers, Haitian workers and peasants should seek to organize their
own class organs of self-defense, which would make a temporary military bloc
with the pro-Aristide “popular organizations” to halt the forward march of
the ultra-rightist reaction. In Russia in August 1917, the weak bourgeois
government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky came under attack by the former tsarist
general Kornilov who marched on Petrograd with his army. The Bolsheviks gave
no political support to Kerensky, whose provisional government had jailed
Trotsky and forced Lenin into hiding. But they understood that a victory of
Kornilov would mean the annihilation of the revolutionary workers in the capital
and defeat of the revolution. Consequently, the workers militias and Bolshevik-led
soldiers blocked militarily with Kerensky’s forces while continuing to oppose
him politically in the soviets. This enabled the revolutionaries to mobilize
the mass of the working people in struggle against the looming counterrevolution,
opening the way to the victory of the October Revolution a couple of months
later.

In the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, Trotsky called on workers to
fight militarily in coordination with the Republican Army and leftist militias
against Franco’s army and the fascists, while continuing the political struggle
for proletarian revolution against the Republican bourgeois government. However,
in that instance, due to the treachery of the reformist workers leaders (Communist,
Socialist and anarchist), the popular-front government smashed workers mobilizations,
arrested and murdered left-wing militants, and thus paved the way for Franco’s
victory and tens of thousands of executions. Whether fighting will reach the
level of civil war in Haiti, or whether the largely unarmed masses have become
so demoralized by the Aristide regime that they passively stand by, is unclear
at this point. But even in extremely unfavorable conditions communists must
tell the truth to the masses and point the way forward to intervene independently
of the squabbling between bourgeois factions and wage a revolutionary class
struggle. That includes raising demands for the formation of workers and
peasants militias, for workers control of the remaining factories and enterprises
(telephone company, transport), for expropriating the prosperous coffee estates
and establishing collective farms which could overcome the ecological devastation
and resuscitate agricultural production.

Above all, it is necessary to form a revolutionary workers party built on
the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, transforming the struggle
for democratic demands into a fight for workers power, for a workers and peasants
government that would undertake socialist tasks and extend the revolution
internationally. Next door in the Dominican Republic, unions have called a
general strike for mid-March against the pro-imperialist government of Hipólito
Mejía, who has implemented the same anti-working-class policies as
Aristide. This is the third Dominican “general strike” in three months. The
last time, on January 29-30, the government arrested hundreds of unionists
and leftists, while army troops just back from Iraq, where they served as
neo-colonial auxiliaries in the U.S. occupation, shot down nine strikers
in cold blood. These two-day “general strikes” are little more than symbolic
protests, where what is needed is a massive working-class mobilization against
the Mejía government and its imperialist backers. A combative Dominican
workers movement could block the transfer of troops to the border areas and
stop the supplies being funneled to the Haitian rightist rebels. It would
also defend Haitian workers on the Dominican sugar cane plantations who have
notoriously worked in conditions of near-slavery while being subjected to
racist police and army repression.

But decisive steps in defending the Haitian poor and working masses must
be taken in the United States itself. In New York City alone there a half
million Haitian immigrants, overwhelmingly workers, who have occasionally
shown their strength such as by marching through Wall Street. The NYC workers
movement should join in opposing any U.S. intervention in Haiti, whatever
the pretext and supposed purpose, while demanding that the U.S. open its borders
to Haitian refugees (yesterday 531 Haitian “boat people” were unloaded by
Coast Guard ships in Port-au-Prince where they face the looming terror of
the approaching death squad army). It should demand independence for Puerto
Rico, the U.S. prime military base in the Caribbean, and for French colonies;
demand the return of the Guantánamo naval base to Cuba and the freeing
of the hundreds of prisoners being held there; and defend Cuba against imperialist
threats. Break with the imperialist war parties, the Democrats and Republicans
and all capitalist parties, to build a revolutionary workers party, part of
a reforged Fourth International that can sweep away imperialism through international
socialist revolution.

In the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, a slave revolt led by Toussaint
Louverture sent shock waves around the Caribbean, made the slavocracy in
the American South shudder and affected the course of the French Revolution.
The creation of the first black republic in the Americas was a major event
in the age of bourgeois-democratic revolutions. Napoleon eventually murdered
Toussaint while French troops vainly reoccupied the colony of Saint-Domingue.
Even after Haitian independence, the black republic of former slaves was
economically strangled, encircled and boycotted by the capitalist powers,
submerging the country in poverty which leaves it still today the poorest
country in the hemisphere. While U.S. spokesmen talk smugly of “failed states”
in order to justify their new colonialist enterprise, the fact is that the
Yankee imperialists have done their best to destroy Haiti. This will not
be undone by a quixotic quest for reparations from the former colonial masters.
But even in the present desperate conditions, the spark of a new rebellion
unleashing a workers uprising across the island of Hispaniola could again
set the Antilles aflame, laying the basis for a socialist federation of the
Caribbean, and act as a revolutionary beacon for the world! n